Moving Up a Gear: The Impact of Compressing Instructional Time into Fewer Years of Schooling

Abstract

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in AbstractPolicy-makers face a trade-off between the provision of higher levels of schooling and earlier labour market entries. A fundamental education reform in Germany tackles this trade-off by reducing high school by one year while leaving the total instructional time unchanged. Employing administrative data on all high school graduates in 2002-2013 in Germany, we exploit both temporal and regional variation in the implementation of the reform and study the overall effectiveness of this reform. We find that compressing the high school track by one year reduces the mean high school graduation age by about 10 months. The probability to repeat a grade level in the course of high school increases by 21 percent (3 percentage points), peaking in the final three years before graduation. However, the high school graduation rate is not affected. The results indicate the reform's success in reducing the graduation age, though it stays behind its potential benefits for labour markets and social security schemes because of higher grade repetition rates.

Can Raising Instructional Time Crowd Out Student Pro-Social Behaviour? Evidence from Germany

“…We take this as evidence that the reform has no effect on drop-out behaviour. This is in line with Huebener and Marcus (2015) who find that the reform does not affect drop-out rates. 41 We define the first treatment cohorts as the cohorts succeeding the double cohorts in order to avoid mixing up implementation effects.…”

“…This is no surprise, though, given that the reform explicitly aimed at reducing the number of school years, thus indirectly reducing the graduation age. In fact, Huebener and Marcus (2015) estimate that the reform decreased the graduation age by about 10 months. Thus, we conclude that the sample is well-balanced on observables, and therefore most likely on unobservables as well.…”

“…6 Next to this literature in economics stands a large body of literature in political science on the relationship 4 to the literature on instructional time (Bellei, 2009;Cortes and Goodman, 2014;Cortes et al, 2015;Herrmann and Rockoff, 2012;Taylor, 2014), and in particular, to the stream that exploits the "G8" reform as a source of exogenous variation: since the first data became available, the reform has been used -due to its features -as a laboratory for empirical research in educational economics. The more sophisticated studies use difference-in-differences designs that exploit variation in its implementation across federal states and school cohorts; they examine its effects on graduation age, grade repetition, and graduation rates (Huebener and Marcus, 2015), postsecondary educational choices , performance (Andrietti, 2016;Homuth, 2012;Huebener et al, 2017), health (Quis and Reif, 2017), and well-being (Quis, 2015). 7 Here, the studies that are methodologically most closely related to ours are Dahmann and Anger (2014) and Dahmann (2017): we use the same dataset and a similar specification as these authors, who show that the reform affects personality traits, and to some extent, cognitive skills.…”

How Does Education Improve Cognitive Skills? Instructional Time versus Timing of Instruction

“…This allows generalization of the results with respect to high school graduates in Baden-Wuerttemberg. Third, I consider grade repeaters, as Huebener and Marcus (2015) find no effects of the reform on repetition rates up to grade nine, but do find that rates doubled in the final years in high school.…”

The Causal Effects of Increased Learning Intensity on Student Achievement: Evidence from a Natural Experiment

“…Dahmann and Anger (2014), Dahmann (2015), and Huebener and Marcus (2015) focus on pre-graduation and/or graduation outcomes. Using 17-year-olds samples from SOEP survey data, Dahmann and Anger (2014) and Dahmann (2015) find that the increased learning intensity introduced by the G8 reform affected some aspects of adolescent personality and improved boys' crystallized intelligence, respectively.…”